Palaszczuk Government’s public service bill hard to justify

JOBS and growth may be a trite slogan, but it is also an ethos that the Palaszczuk Government has embraced with considerable enthusiasm … at least when it comes to the ballooning the senior ranks of the state public service.

• State’s public servant hiring binge

JOBS and growth may be a trite slogan, but it is also an ethos that the Palaszczuk Government has embraced with considerable enthusiasm … at least when it comes to the ballooning number of high-paying positions in the senior ranks of the state public service.

While unemployment in the state remains above the national average, frustrated Queenslanders could be forgiven for thinking the Government is trying to engineer a public servant-led recovery.

As The Courier-Mail reports today, the number of senior bureaucrats in the state public service has swelled by more than 30 per cent over the three years to December 17, which broadly covers Labor’s first term in office.

These are positions classified at Senior Officer level or above. At this level salaries start at $147,000 a year, rising to multiples of that number in the upper echelons of the Senior Executive Service band and for chief executive officers.

It is hard to place an exact figure on the huge extra burden this places on the state Budget, but the cost of these extra public services bosses runs into the hundreds of millions of dollars at the very least.

Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk. Picture: AAP/Regi Varghese

Clearly a growing state will bring with it an expanding public service. Quite simply, more people living here means we need more nurses, police, teachers, road engineers and so forth to deliver the key services that voters rightly expect of government.

The surge in public service numbers (at all levels) in Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk’s first term was attributed by Labor to a growth in frontline numbers (though the Government has not provided evidence that increasing those staff has led to commensurate service improvements).

However, growing the public service chiefs at three times the rate the wider government sector is expanding though does not pass the sniff test.

If you earn upwards of $147,000 a year you are at the very least middle management material and, with the exception of doctors, highly unlikely to be a frontline worker bee.

While Ms Palaszczuk’s office has insisted that many of the roles were medical, they also refer vaguely to “other positions” in Queensland Health.

Nor does it pass the Government’s own benchmark of limiting growth in public service numbers to that of population growth (currently running at 1.7 per cent), and the soaring numbers of upper echelon public servants should be of real concern to anyone who believes in maintaining a sustainable budget position.

A not insignificant contributor to the somewhat shop-soiled state balance sheet Queensland has today was the unbridled expansion of the public service during the years of the Bligh government.

This sowed the seeds for a recurrent expenditure bill that the Newman government briefly brought under control, but is once again in danger of blowing out.

Voters understand a big state does need a sizeable public sector, and will wear their taxes going to a multi-billion wages bill if they feel services are not only just delivered but are seen to be improving.

As such it is not so much about the numbers per se, but the bang we get from the dollars spent.

If our train services were not still running to a limited timetable, if public hospital waiting lists were shrinking, if public housing queues were shrinking, and child safety better resourced the argument might be slightly different.

Right now though it would appear that we are growing a bloated bureaucracy at the expense of both fiscal sustainability and those frontline services which would be far more deserving of a funding boost than the denizens of 1 William St. If Treasurer Jackie Trad wants to leave a positive legacy, some serious restraint is needed.

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MARATHON MAN CAN STAND TALL

ONLINE trolls are like cockroaches. They scuttle around in the shadows, brave in their anonymity, and spreading grime and pestilence wherever they go. Unlike cockroaches though, they tend to hunt in packs, a swirling cloud of confected outrage and judgment looking for a soft target.

One of those targets recently has been champion Australian athlete Michael Shelley who won gold in the marathon at the recent Commonwealth Games on the Gold Coast. Shelley was singled out by the online bile merchants after he kept going past stricken Scottish runner Callum Hawkins who had collapsed in the heat just 2km from the finish.

Marathon gold medallist Michael Shelley. Picture: AAP/Dean Lewins

This is, quite literally, a marathon at the most elite level of the sport where the competitors push themselves to the limit and beyond over a 42km course. Towards the end of the race those runners still going are in a zone, focused solely on lasting the distance before their bodies give out.

What the trolls expected Shelley to actually do is unclear. It is against the rules to offer another runner assistance and both men would have been disqualified if he had.

And exactly what assistance could Shelley – who was not carrying water or a first-aid kit – have actually rendered at the time?

All he would have achieved was being in the way of officials and paramedics who arrived to treat the Scotsman. Shelley earned every gruelling metre of his marathon gold, and is far more reflective of Australian values than the bitter little keyboard warriors who spew hate from the sidelines.